St. Chrysostom

Chapter 1. Introductory

{217} I CONFESS to a delight in reading the
lives, and dwelling on the characters and actions, of the Saints of
the first ages, such as I receive from none besides them; and for this
reason, because we know so much more about them than about most of the
Saints who come after them. People are variously constituted; what
influences one does not influence another. There are persons of warm
imaginations, who can easily picture to themselves what they never
saw. They can at will see Angels and Saints hovering over them when
they are in church; they see their lineaments, their features, their
motions, their gestures, their smile or their grief. They can go home
and draw what they have seen, from the vivid memory of what, while it
lasted, was so transporting. I am not one of such; I am touched by my
five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear. I am touched by
what I read about, not by what I myself create. As faith need not lead
to practice, so in me mere imagination does not lead to devotion. I
gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a
treatise de Deo. I gain more from three verses of St. John than
from the three points of a meditation. I like a Spanish crucifix of
painted wood more than one {218} from Italy, which is made of gold. I
am more touched by the Seven Dolours than by the Immaculate
Conception; I am more devout to St. Gabriel than to one of Isaiah's
seraphim. I love St. Paul more than one of those first Carmelites, his
contemporaries, whose names and acts no one ever heard of; I feel
affectionately towards the Alexandrian Dionysius, I do homage to St.
George. I do not say that my way is better than another's; but it is
my way, and an allowable way. And it is the reason why I am so
specially attached to the Saints of the third and fourth century,
because we know so much about them. This is why I feel a devout
affection for St. Chrysostom. He and the rest of them have written
autobiography on a large scale; they have given us their own
histories, their thoughts, words, and actions, in a number of goodly
folios, productions which are in themselves some of their meritorious
works.

I do not know where else to find the daily life, the secret heart,
of such favoured servants of God, unveiled to their devout disciples
in such completeness and fidelity. Modern times afford some instances
of the kind: St. Theresa is one of them; St. Francis de Sales is
another: still, on the whole, what should we have known of the
generality of the great Saints of the later centuries, had we been
left to themselves for the information? We should of course have had
the treasure of their recorded visions, prophecies, and meditations;
but these are portions of their divine, not their human life, and
rather belong to what God did for them, than to what they did for
themselves. There is one circumstance, indeed, which tells in their
favour; we have their portraits. This, I grant, is in favour of the
moderns; certainly we have no idea at all of the personal appearance,
the expression of countenance, or the bearing of St. Athanasius or
St.. Hilary. It is {219} assuredly a great point, if the case be so,
that we have likenesses of the modern Saints. But I am not sure that
we have; often there was no attempt at all made to take their
likenesses in their lifetime; sometimes they would not let themselves
be taken when there was. St. Philip Neri once caught an artist in the
very commission of that great offence, and stopped him; and the
unfinished picture hangs up to this day at the Pellegrini, a
memorial of a painter's devotion and a saint's modesty. Sometimes,
again, there may be a good likeness; but, perhaps, however interesting
in itself, it was taken before the Saint's conversion, and can only
satisfy a human curiosity: sometimes it was taken, indeed, but has
been lost, and the copies, if there are any, are not to be trusted.
Sometimes the artist's veneration has idealized the countenance, or
the popular demand has vulgarized it. How has a devout poetry
embellished some of the ordinary portraits of the great St. Carlo! how
does the original likeness of St. Ignatius differ from the military
countenance and figure which ordinary pencils have bestowed upon him!
You cannot thus wander from the original, in the new edition you put
to press of St. Ambrose or the blessed Theodoret.

I repeat, what I want to trace and study is the real, hidden but
human, life, or the interior, as it is called, of such glorious
creations of God; and this I gain with difficulty from mere
biographies. Those biographies are most valuable both as being true
and as being edifying; they are true to the letter, as far as they
record facts and acts; I know it: but actions are not enough for
sanctity; we must have saintly motives; and as to these motives, the
actions themselves seldom carry the motives along with them. In
consequence, they are often supplied simply by the biographer out of
his own head; and with {220} good reason supplied, from the certainty
which he feels that, since it is the act of a Saint which he is
describing, therefore it must be a saintly act. Properly and naturally
supplied, I grant: but I can do that as well as he; and ought to do it
for myself, and shall be sure to do it, if I make the Saint my
meditation. The biographer in that case is no longer a mere witness
and reporter; he has become a commentator. He gives me no insight into
the Saint's interior; he does but tell me to infer that the
Saint acted in some transcendent way from the reason of the case, or
to hold it on faith because he has been canonized. For instance: When
I read in such a life, "The Saint, when asked a question, was
silent from humility," or "from compassion for the ignorance
of the speaker," or "in order to give him a gentle
rebuke,"—I find a motive assigned, whichever of the three is
selected, which is the biographer's own, and perhaps has two chances
to one against its being the right one. We read of an occasion on
which St. Athanasius said nothing, but smiled, when a question was put
to him: it was another Saint who asked the question, and who has
recorded the smile; but he does not more than doubtfully explain it.
Many a biographer would, simply out of piety, have pronounced the
reason of that smile. I should not blame him for doing so; but it was
more than he could do as a biographer; if he did it, he would do it,
not as an historian, but as a spiritual writer.

On the other hand, when a Saint is himself the speaker, he
interprets his own action; and that is what I find done in such
fulness in the case of those early luminaries of the Church to whom I
am referring. I want to hear a Saint converse; I am not content to
look at him as a statue; his words are the index of his hidden life,
as far as that life can be known to man, for "out of the
abundance {221} of the heart the mouth speaketh." This is why I
exult in the folios of the Fathers. I am not obliged to read the whole
of them, I read what I can and am content. Though I may not have
advanced into their interior more than a certain way, still, what I
have read is good so far as it goes. It does not derogate from the
reality of that knowledge and love of a Saint which I have actually
got from what I have read already of his writings, that there is much
more of those writings to be read and much more of him to be loved.
Cannot we know and love the King of Saints? Yet we ever can know more
and more about Him, and gain further motives for loving Him.

2.

Now the Ancient Saints have left behind them just that kind of
literature which more than any other represents the abundance of the
heart, which more than any other approaches to conversation; I mean
correspondence. Why is it that we feel an interest in Cicero which we
cannot feel in Demosthenes or Plato? Plato is the very type of soaring
philosophy, and Demosthenes of forcible eloquence; Cicero is something
more than orator and a sage; he is not a mere ideality, he is a man
and a brother; he is one of ourselves. We do not merely believe it, or
infer it, but we have the enduring and living evidence of it—how? In
his letters. He can be studied, criticized if you will; but still
dwelt upon and sympathized with also. Now the case of the Ancient
Saints is parallel to that of Cicero. We have their letters in a
marvellous profusion. We have above 400 letters of St. Basil's; above
200 of St. Augustine's. St. Chrysostom has left us about 240; St.
Gregory Nazianzen the same number; Pope St. Gregory as many as 840.
St. Nilus close on 1400 short {222} ones; St. Isidore, 1440. The
blessed Theodoret, 146; St. Leo, 140; St. Cyprian, 80 or 90; St.
Paulinus, 50; St. Jerome, above 100; St. Ambrose, 90. St. Bernard, the
last of the fathers, supplies 444; and St. Anselm, the first of the
schoolmen, nearly the same number. I am passing beyond the early
Saints; so I might go on to certain modern, as St. Francis Xavier; but
they all belong to one school of literature, which is now well-nigh
extinct.

These letters are of very various characters, compared one with
another: a large portion of them were intended simply for the parties
to whom they are addressed; a large portion consist of brief answers
to questions asked of the writer, or a few words of good counsel or
spiritual exhortation, disclosing his character either by the topic
selected, or his mode of dealing with it. Many are doctrinal; great
numbers, again, are strictly ecclesiastical and ex cathedrÔ.
Many are historical and biographical; some might be called
state-papers; some narrate public transactions, and how the writer
felt towards them, or why he took part in them. Pope Gregory's
epistles give us the same sort of insight into the holy solicitude for
the universal Christian people which possessed him, that minute
vigilance, yet comprehensive superintendence of the chief pastor,
which in a very different field of labour is seen in the Duke of
Wellington's despatches on campaign, which tell us so much more about
him than any panegyrical sketch. Those of St. Isidore and St. Nilus
consist of little more than one or two terse, pithy, pregnant
sentences, which may be called sermonets, and are often as vivid as if
we heard them. St. Chrysostom's are for the most part crowded into the
three memorable years in which the sufferings of exile gradually
ripened into a virtual martyrdom. Others, as some of those of St.
Jerome and St. Ambrose, are meditations on mystical {223} subjects.
Those of St. Dionysius of Alexandria, which are but fragments, recount
the various trials of the time, and are marked with a vigorous
individuality which invests the narrative with an interest far higher
than historical.

This manifestation of themselves the Ancient Saints carry with them
into other kinds of composition, where it was less to be expected.
Instead of writing formal doctrinal treatises, they write controversy;
and their controversy, again, is correspondence. They mix up their own
persons, natural and supernatural, with the didactic or polemical
works which engaged them. Their authoritative declarations are
written, not on stone tablets, but on what Scripture calls "the
fleshly tables of the heart." The line of their discussion
traverses a region rich and interesting, and opens on those who follow
them in it a succession of instructive views as to the aims, the
difficulties, the disappointments, under which they journeyed on
heavenward, their care of the brethren, their anxieties about
contemporary teachers of error. Dogma and proof are in them at the
same time hagiography. They do not write a summa theologiŠ, or
draw out a catena, or pursue a single thesis through the stages
of a scholastic disputation. They wrote for the occasion, and seldom
on a carefully-digested plan.

The same remark holds of their comments upon Scripture. A speaker
and an audience are prominent throughout them; and we gain an insight
into their own character and the circumstances of their times, while
we are indoctrinated in the sacred text. When Pope Gregory comments
upon Ezechiel, he writes about the Lombards, his own people, and
himself. What a vivid idea we have of St. Chrysostom! partly from his
style, partly from his matter; yet we gain it from his formal
expositions of {224} Scripture. His expositions are discourses; his
discourses, whether he will or no, are manifestations. St. Gregory
Nazianzen has written discourses too, by means of which he has gained
for himself the special title of "Theologus;" yet these same
orations give us also a large range of information about his own life,
his kindred and friends, his feelings and his fortunes; and, as if
this were not enough, he has bequeathed to us, besides his letters,
his poems, a huge collection of miscellaneous verse, full of himself
and his times. They are his confessions.

Here I am reminded of the celebrated work of St. Augustine's which
bears that name, and which has no parallel in sacred literature. Of
the same character are portions of the correspondence of St. Basil,
and, again, of St. Jerome. It is remarkable, on the other hand, that
certain ancient writers, who, able and learned as they are, have no
title to be called Saints, such as Tertullian and Eusebius, afford as
few instances as possible in their works, as far as I know, of that
tenderness and simplicity of character which leads their saintly
contemporaries to an unstudied self-manifestation.

3.

It is perhaps presumptuous in me to have spoken of the Fathers thus
universally, and I may have made mistakes in detail; but I have
confidence in my general principle, and its general exemplification in
their case. Words are the exponents of thoughts, and a silent Saint is
the object of faith rather than of affection. If he speaks, then we
have the original before us; if he is silent, we must put up with a
copy, done with more or less skill according to the painter. But in
saying this, I do not mark off the Saints into two distinct classes,
those who speak and those who are {225} silent; I am only contrasting
two kinds of exhibition which are variously fulfilled in them, taken
one by one. Nor is a silent Saint one who does not write, but one who
does not speak; and some of them may manifest themselves by their
short sayings and their single words more graphically than if they had
written a volume. When St. Philip Neri excused his abstemiousness on
the ground of his fear lest he should get as fat as his friend
Francesco Scarletti, or hid his religious tears with the jest,
"Mayn't a poor orphan weep, who has neither father nor
mother?" or made Consolini read out loud a storybook to him, when
certain great lords of Poland came to see a Saint, he let us into his
character better than by many treatises. Nor are any words at all
necessary in some cases; for I suppose the Martyrs, who are the most
ancient Saints of all, speak by their deaths; whereas some of the
Fathers, as St. Isidore of Seville, and various medieval Saints, have
written many large books, and tell us, alas! about themselves nothing.
And further still, in the present state of education among us, I do
not see how it is possible we should enjoy that personal knowledge of
the Saints which seems to me so desirable. The bulk of the faithful
have nothing at all to do with Saints' lives or writings, for this
simple reason, because they cannot read, or do not like reading. They
are devout to a Saint, as they are devout to their Guardian Angel,
because he is a work of God, full of grace and glory, and able to
protect them. I recollect an Irishman of the humblest class
complaining of the sermon of a Religious because it had nothing in it
about the Saints: the fact was not so at all, and in the pulpit from
which the sermon was preached there had been much about Saints Sunday
after Sunday. But it turned out that the complainant was devout to St.
Joseph; and his real {226} grievance was, that St. Joseph was not
mentioned in the sermon. Nor did he want more than the mention of his
glorious patron's name; his very name inspired devotion, he needed no
life of him. I wish we, with all our learning, were sure of having
this poor man's devotion; but that wish is nothing to the purpose in
my present argument, in which I am not contrasting educated and
uneducated piety, but the popular biographies of Saints and their
actual writings.

Nor must it be supposed that I think lightly of the debt of
gratitude which we owe to their biographers. It is not their fault if
their Saint has been silent; all that we know about him, be it much,
be it little, we owe to them. As I was saying just now, some of those
saints who have written most have told us least. There is St. Thomas;
he was called in his youth the Bos Siculus for his silence; it is one
of the few personal traits which we have of him; and for that very
reason, though it does but record the privation of which I am
complaining, it is worth a good deal. It is a great consolation to
know that he was the Bos Siculus; it makes us feel a sympathy with
him, and leads us to trust that perhaps he will feel some sympathy for
us, who for one reason or other are silent at times when we should
like to be speaking. But it is the sole consolation for that forlorn
silence of his, since, although at length he broke it to some purpose,
as regards theology, and became a marvel (according to the proverb in
such cases), still he is as silent as before in regard to himself. The
Angel of the schools! how overflowing he must have been, I say to
myself, in all bright supernatural visions, and beautiful and sublime
thoughts! how serene in his contemplation of them! how winning in his
communication! but he has not helped me ever so little in apprehending
what I {227} firmly believe about him. He wrote his Summa and
his Hymns under obedience, I suppose; and no obedience was
given him to speak of himself. So we are thrown upon his biographers,
and but for them, we should speak of him as we speak of the author of
the Imitation or of the Veni Creator, only as of a great
unknown benefactor. All honour, then, and gratitude to the writers of
Saints' lives. They have done what they could. It would not have
improved matters if they had been silent as well as the Saint; still,
they cannot make up for their Saint's silence; they do not deprive me
of my grievance, that at present I do not really know those to whom I
am devout, whom I hope to see in heaven.

4.

A Saint's writings are to me his real "Life;" and what is
called his "Life" is not the outline of an individual,
but either of the auto-saint or of a myth. Perhaps I shall be
asked what I mean by "Life." I mean a narrative which
impresses the reader with the idea of moral unity, identity, growth,
continuity, personality. When a Saint converses with me, I am
conscious of the presence of one active principle of thought, one
individual character, flowing on and into the various matters which he
discusses, and the different transactions in which he mixes. It is
what no memorials can reach, however skilfully elaborated, however
free from effort or study, however conscientiously faithful, however
guaranteed by the veracity of the writers. Why cannot art rival the
lily or the rose? Because the colours of the flower are developed and
blended by the force of an inward life; while on the other hand, the
lights and shades of the painter are diligently laid on from without.
A magnifying glass will show the difference. Nor will it improve {228}
matters, though not one only, but a dozen good artists successively
take part in the picture; even if the outline is unbroken, the
colouring is muddy. Commonly, what is called "the Life," is
little more than a collection of anecdotes brought together from a
number of independent quarters; anecdotes striking, indeed, and
edifying, but valuable in themselves rather than valuable as parts of
a biography; valuable whoever was the subject of them, not valuable as
illustrating a particular Saint. It would be difficult to mistake for
each other a paragraph of St. Ambrose, or of St. Jerome, or of St.
Augustine; it would be very easy to mistake a chapter in the life of
one holy missionary or nun for a chapter in the life of another.

An almsgiving here, an instance of meekness there, a severity of
penance, a round of religious duties,—all these things humble me,
instruct me, improve me; I cannot desire any thing better of their
kind; but they do not necessarily coalesce into the image of a person.
From such works I do but learn to pay devotion to an abstract and
typical perfection under a certain particular name; I do not know more
of the real Saint who bore it than before. Saints, as other men,
differ from each other in this, that the multitude of qualities which
they have in common are differently combined in each of them. This
forms one great part of their personality. One Saint is remarkable for
fortitude; not that he has not other heroic virtues by concomitance,
as it may be called, but by virtue of that one gift in particular he
has won his crown. Another is remarkable for patient hope, another for
renunciation of the world. Such a particular virtue may be said to
give form to all the rest which are grouped round it, and are moulded
and modified by means of it. Thus it is that often what is right {229}
in one would be wrong in another; and, in fact, the very same action
is allowed or chosen by one, and shunned by another as being
consistent or inconsistent with their respective characters,—pretty
much as in the combination of colours, each separate tint takes a
shade from the rest, and is good or bad from its company. The whole
gives a meaning to the parts; but it is difficult to rise from the
parts to the whole. When I read St. Augustine or St. Basil, I hold
converse with a beautiful grace-illumined soul, looking out into this
world of sense, and leavening it with itself; when I read a professed
life of him, I am wandering in a labyrinth of which I cannot find the
centre and heart, and am but conducted out of doors again when I do my
best to penetrate within.

This seems to me, to tell the truth, a sort of pantheistic
treatment of the Saints. I ask something more than to stumble upon the
disjecta membra of what ought to be a living whole. I take but
a secondary interest in books which chop up a Saint into chapters of
faith, hope, charity, and the cardinal virtues. They are too
scientific to be devotional. They have their great utility, but it is
not the utility which they profess. They do not manifest a Saint, they
mince him into spiritual lessons. They are rightly called spiritual
reading, that is just what they are, and they cannot possibly be any
thing better; but they are not any thing else. They contain a series
of points of meditation on particular virtues, made easier because
those points are put under the patronage and the invocation of a
Saint. With a view to learning real devotion to him, I prefer
(speaking for myself) to have any one action or event of his life
drawn out minutely, with his own comments upon it, than a score of
virtues, or of acts of one virtue, strung together in as many
sentences. Now, in the ancient writings I have spoken {230} of,
certain transactions are thoroughly worked out. We know all that
happened to a Saint on such or such an occasion, all that was done by
him. We have a view of his character, his tastes, his natural
infirmities, his struggles and victories over them, which in no other
way can be attained. And therefore it is that, without quarrelling
with the devotion of others, I give the preference to my own.

This is why it is so difficult to be patient with such Church
histories as Mosheim's, putting out of the question his Protestant
prejudices. When you have read through a century of him, you have as
little distinct idea of what he has been about, as when you began. You
have been hurried about from subject to subject, from external history
to internal, from ceremonies to divines, from heresies to
persecutions, till you find that you have gained nothing but to be
fatigued. If history is to mirror the actual course of time, it must
also be a course itself; it must not be the mere emptying out of a
portfolio of unconnected persons and events, which are not
synchronous, nor co-ordinate, nor correlative, but merely arranged, if
arrangement it can be called, according to the convenience of the
author. And I have a parallel difficulty in the case of hagiographers,
when they draw out their materials, not according to years, but
according to virtues. Such reading is not history, it is moral
science; nay, hardly that: for chronological considerations will be
neglected; youth, manhood, and age, will be intermingled. I shall not
be able to trace out, for my own edification, the solemn conflict
which is waging in the soul between what is divine and what is human,
or the eras of the successive victories won by the powers and
principles which are divine. I shall not be able to determine whether
there was heroism in the young, {231} whether there was not infirmity
and temptation in the old. I shall not be able to explain actions
which need explanation, for the age of the actors is the true key for
entering into them. I shall be wearied and disappointed, and I shall
go back with pleasure to the Fathers.

Here another great subject opens upon us, when I ought to be bringing
these remarks to an end; I mean the endemic perennial fidget which
possesses us about giving scandal; facts are omitted in great
histories, or glosses are put upon memorable acts, because they are
thought not edifying, whereas of all scandals such omissions, such
glosses, are the greatest. But I am getting far more argumentative
than I thought to be when I began; so I lay my pen down, and retire
into myself.